Absolute BS

DotNetNuke 4 is written for ASP.NET 2.0 using Visual Basic. I’m not a big fan of VB, so I do all my .NET development in C#. Luckily, Microsoft has made these languages play very well together, so you can write C# classes that extend classes in assemblies compiled from VB. However the DotNetNuke guys don’t have a lot of documentation about using C#. Their tutorials for writing modules are also very “in-the-box” that assume you want to write modules that work in a very specific way, especially when it comes to the database.

Their module development is very structured, including an MVC-type of framework that feels very forced. They have good ideas about the number of abstraction layers in the data access, but it seems far too complex for, say, a simple guestbook module, and the process assumes that you are creating a new kind of object that will require persistance. It also requires you to slop code all over your DNN installation, where I wanted to package a up the module a little more cleanly. So I started thinking, “what about the Hello World?” So I wrote one in C#.

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Updated on 8/12/2008 — It has come to my attention this solution stopped working with DotNetNuke 4.8. I believe it should work with 4.5 - 4.7. I don’t work with DNN anymore so I probably can’t be very helpful, but if someone else has written a newer post on the topic, I’d be happy to link there.

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So I’ve been working with DotNetNuke as our portal solution at work. My first task was to plug in to the authentication scheme to make it use our existing user database. This seems like a simple request, and in the end it was.

My big problem was the lack of documentation. First of all there is very little experience out there with DNN4. Secondly, the other providers of SSO are either commercial or very confusing, especially for a Java-turned-C# developer like myself. So I thought I’d lay it out, because it’s not very hard.
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